8 minute read
Where sustainability is the legacy, Hannah Williams of Blue Hill at Stone Barns
Hannah Williams is the Head Sommelier and Beverage Director at New York’s famed Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Originally from Miami, Florida, Williams took a circuitous path to leading the beverage programme at one of the United States’ best-known restaurants. Although as she says, “as a former ballet dancer, used to being in a niche, hyper-dedicated world, working at the highest level of hospitality wasn’t foreign to me.” While studying English at New York’s prestigious Barnard College, Williams took an opportunity in her junior year to attend the University of Edinburgh. Williams joined a wine society at the college, admittedly for the novelty of being able to drink wine at 19 (the legal drinking age in the United States is 21). She soon discovered a talent for wine and was promoted to the university’s competitive blind tasting team. This experience afforded Williams the opportunity to travel to the classic wine regions of Europe. Upon her return to the United States to finish her degree, she took an intern position with Wine & Spirits magazine to combine her scholastic and outside interests. Williams officially had the wine bug. Soon thereafter she was convinced to work at a new Italian restaurant, called La Sirena, before eventually transitioning to Blue Hill at Stone Barns.
Through being here, I’ve learned very quickly the difference between true sustainable practices and ones that aren’t.
ASI: When you inherited the job of managing the wine programme at Blue Hill at Stone Barns did it feel like an honour or a heavy burden?
Hannah Williams (HW): It's definitely both. A wine programme of this stature and size is really a legacy programme. I feel like I'm reaping rewards of the wine directors before me, and not just the last one. When there is an opportunity to cellar wines for more than a decade, that’s special. You also learn a lot from building a programme from scratch, which I had seen at my previous job, as part of the wine team, but it's another ball game when you're inheriting the history of a place. It was intimidating at first, but I was up for the challenge.
ASI: Blue Hill is famous for its commitment to the sustainability which includes Stone Barns Center, a nonprofit agriculture and gastronomy research center with a mission to catalyse an ecological food culture in the Northeast United States. How do you infuse the same ethos into your wine programme?
HW: I have learned here to immerse myself in sustainability and seasonality, which was a bit of a foreign concept to me growing up in Florida, where farmers’ markets were just fruit stands and there was no ‘tomato’ season per se. The education programme here is demanding. To simply deliver food to a table there is so much to learn. Our front of house team are educators relaying so much information about agriculture and farming to our guests. Through being here, I’ve learned very quickly the difference between true sustainable practices and ones that aren’t, and I’ve applied this to my understanding of the wine world. While I've never been super outdoorsy or agriculturally minded, I have discovered you don't need to have any (farming) experience to understand vine health. If you look at a row of vines and see dark, dead earth the vines aren’t healthy. If you look at another row next and see life, with insects, pollinators and things growing between the vines, it is. Philosophically, it has made me have to pay attention to things like that. Which leads me to support winemakers that are doing it correctly, whether that's in Champagne, Corsica, Long Island, or the Finger Lakes. It means a lot to make a wine list that earns a Grand Award from Wine Spectator, even if it involves omitting wines regardless of market demand. That says a lot.
ASI: So how does certification of organic, or biodynamic practices, for example, factor into your decision making?
HW: I never buy wines based on a certification. You need to think deeper. A good example is several Demeter certified Oregon Willamette Valley winemakers, who faced with wildfires and an infestation of a rare insect, that comes every 25 years, that lay eggs in the grape cluster, choose to use a non-chemical, but not Demeter certified spray. They aren’t allowed to be certified Demeter anymore but are they any less sustainable? As such, I never buy based on an organic or biodynamic label. We're more interested in the story about the people, the families behind the wines, and how they as individuals are working with their vineyards and their land. We can really promote this via the by the glass selections. Since we don't have a set menu, but essentially a tasting menu with wine pairings we can talk at length about the story of these wines. When we're selecting a wine to be in one of these slots, it's very important to us to be able to communicate to our customer who's making it, how they're making it, and where they're making it in a really personal and thoughtful way.
ASI: How do you deal with carbon print of heavy bottles? Do you ever consider wines in non-traditional packaging?
HW: That's just not in the cards for us at a fine dining level. During the pandemic, there was a moment that canned wine, for example, made sense, but it really isn't something we considered for the long-term. We continue to buy wine in glass bottles. That said, it is great we (the broader wine world) are having conversations about reducing bottle weight.
ASI: How does local play into your thought process?
HW: We have an international list, but we also love pouring and supporting local New York wines. There are some great local wines. Recently we have had the opportunity, for a large table, to open a magnum of 2010 Paumanok Assemblage, a Merlot dominant Bordeaux blend from the North Fork of Long Island. It was amazing! It’s great to have local wines like this to introduce guest to, who might have ordered a second growth Bordeaux, for example, and serve a wine like this. No one would have guessed it was from Long Island.
It’s just so fun to bring it back home by weaving in local wines alongside the classic wines of the world.
ASI: Are you finding customers more willing to experiment?
HW: Definitely! They trust us to pick out wines from all over the world. You can take them to Corsica, or you can start them with a sparkling wine from the French Alps, but you can also introduce them to a dry Riesling from the Finger Lakes (New York) or a light Pinot blend coming from the North Fork of Long Island. It’s just so fun to bring it back home by weaving in local wines alongside the classic wines of the world. I think this is really important.
ASI: What are other ways you craft a sustainable drinks programme?
HW: As beverage director I also oversee the bar programme. We do many things to ensure almost zero waste. Although, we don't have a liquor production license, which means being careful with respect to fermentation. We focus on creating infusions. In fact, our bar programme is built around byproducts of the kitchen. Whether it's cilantro stems or corn cobs or leftover sorghum that we're turning into sorghum syrup, we're using those leftovers like an apothecary and as a first response to the waste that comes from the kitchen. And vice versa, the kitchen uses our waste. We collect any leftover wine, and either provide it to our chefs for cooking, or keep them to make things like vermouths and infusions. We are not able to distill, but we ferment like everything. We have someone dedicated on staff, purely to fermentation projects related to that.
ASI: Is this how you introduce sustainability via seasonality into your beverage programme?
HW: Yes. When it's winter, for example, we really must rely on preserved items rather than fresh ones. This is evident in our bar programme, which we're proud of. Since we only serve about 50 people, or less, a night these days we can create some special small batch products for them at the bar, using ingredients the kitchen gives us. We must work very closely with them, but I think that makes the end results the best they can be.
